Today EyeEm has announced on its blog that it will run the EyeEm Market in partnership with stock image giant Getty Images. Florian Meissner, one of the co-founders of EyeEm and the company's CEO commented on the partnership:

“What sets EyeEm imagery apart is that our community is inspired by and captures an often unexpected look at the world around us. It´s heart- rather than art-directed – authentic, fresh and often hyper local. We call it real photography. And now because of our partnership with Getty Images and their extensive distribution network, members of our community will have a great opportunity to earn revenue from their creative work.”

The EyeEm Collection at Getty will be curated by the EyeEm team but users will have full control over which of their images they want to provide for inclusion. EyeEm says the terms of the platform are fair, easy and transparent. The users always retain the copyright of their images and make 50% net revenue from each sale.

This is not the first time for a stock agency to partner with an online image platform. Alamy for example has been working with the Yahoo-owned Flickr for many years. However, unlike Flickr, EyeEm is predominantly a mobile platform with a large proportion of its images captured and/or edited on mobile devices. It'll be interesting to observe how the EyeEm curated images perform in the highly competitive stock image marketplace and if EyeEm's much larger competitor, Instagram, will make a similar move in the near future.

If I may preach for my own church here, with Fotolia Instant App you'll get between 30% and 60% royalties depending on your Rank. No split with another agency ;);)The collection starts looking amazing, and our customers love it.Here's a little selection for the curious: http://www.fotolia.com/Galleries/utq9d2QP9uNbZl3NoJ7eP9RV7ltNBUjv

Don't overlook the term "net revenue". Getty currently takes 70% from its photographers. Couple this with a 50% split after that by EyeEm supplying them, just as a photographer would, and the net revenue gets pretty small.

There are much better avenues out there to sell images through. Getty is banking on a contributor accepting pennies on the dollar, rather than a perceived nothing because they don't know the other higher revenue selling outlets.

For news images, and owned by Corbis Imaging, the other giant in the stock market, is Demotix. When an image is sold by them, Corbis doesn't take a cut off the top, the contributor gets an actual 50% split.

UAU!!!!! Now i have even one more way to let getty make money and/or publicity from my images while i get ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!! X)

YEEiiiiiiiii!!!!!!

WAIT!I was totally unfair: I can make 50% out of some 20% which gives at best some woping 10% of what getty says they make...IF THEY DON'T GIVE MY PHOTO FOR FREE FOR ANYONE IN ALL INTERNET!!! YIpiiii!!!!-_-

No one can deny the impact and immediacy of images created by people "on the spot" when news happens. That said, you'd have to be blind not to see how awful photography is getting in the news thanks to amateurs and passers-by and field reporters taking the images.

Getty just announced its give away of photos for blogs and non-commercial websites. Now it has more content to give away. If Getty will have a claim to fame in the history of stock photography, it will be that it ruined it!